ePulse hosts OTCtrader at DXI
Background
ePulse was founded in March 1998 in order to provide software and services to the financial markets. The company has enjoyed strong growth over the years which is evident by its ranking on the Sunday Time Tech Track 100 and the Deloitte EMEA 500 listings. Its' professional services business has undertaken many major projects for major financial and trading institutions worldwide. These services range from programme management to large-scale development, support and relocation work.
The ePulse client list includes some of the largest financial and energy trading houses including BP Oil, ABN-AMRO, ICAP, MTFG, Fortis Bank and Reuters/Telerate.
Today's financial institutions are constantly striving to profitably meet the demands of the fast growing Asian economies and their appetite for oil, metals and other commodities. To do this, ePulse have developed a range of regulatory compliance and OTC trading software products that allows global financial, energy and commodities trading institutions to address these issues.
The latest innovation is an OTC trading suite of software specifically designed for the non-exchange traded OTC markets. The OTCtrader has some of the most advanced messaging software coupled with full electronic price distribution and trade processing capability. It is specifically designed to bring increased order flow and to an otherwise illiquid market where all transactions are done on a negotiated basis. It brings to bear the full power of Internet technologies in order to allow financial institutions to globally market their products in a low cost, high performance manner.
Some of the other products ePulse have developed include Applications Management and Audit Logging software in order to meet the ever demanding European and U.S. regulatory and compliance requirements.
Challenges
"The deployment and wider acceptance of the OTCtrader product is critically dependent on factors such as costs, rapid return of investment, reliability and speed as well as the ease of deployment and subsequent support level agreements", said Barry Patel Sales and Marketing Director of ePulse.
In order to compete with much cheaper and often free products that provide basic functionality, ePulse have developed a rich client application with trading specific functionality. "Value for money is not the sole criteria for ensuring take up of the product. ePulse need reliability and speed as well" said Patel. Every financial institution has different technology and applications environment depending on their evolutionary lifecycle and nature of their business. This makes it very difficult to integrate a new application with it’s own client-server architecture into an existing trading environment. "If the application can be deployed (partly or wholly) in an off-site Service Oriented Architecture then the integration issues and inter-operability with existing applications are eased considerably. In particular full fault tolerance and fail over can also be provided to all customers for this business critical application", added Patel.
The OTCtrader enables traders to use their own Yahoo, MSN or AOL instant messaging accounts for carrying out pre-trade negotiations. This means using public Internet access with all its vagaries and particularly speed of communications with counter-parties that are sometimes thousands of miles away. "By hosting our application as close to the Internet backbone as possible, provides greatly improved speed and reliability. With this high performance environment ePulse can also provide enhanced electronic trading facilities to our clients matching their existing in-house capabilities" said Tony Colbourne OTCtrader Product Manager.
The final challenge is one of reliability and support. "If the application can be deployed in a consistent environment such that all customers have access to the same version of the application, then deployment and upgrades become simpler leading to reliability improvements across the whole client base", added Colbourne.
"ePulse were approached by many ISPs in order to meet our business requirements, but none of them had the overall high bandwidth Internet based, resilient infrastructure needed for our requirements except for DXI. In addition DXI demonstrated flexibility, professionalism and technical capability to foster a close mutually beneficial relationship. Their hosting environment and the quality of their infrastructure were also an important factor in our decision making process”, said Patel.
Solution
Using the DXI Business Hosting Solution, which is based on dual data centres linked by a powerful dark fibre network, the hosting of the OTCtrader application was moved across to DXI.
"It was their network that really sold it for me", said Colbourne, "I have previously used the infrastructure behind it and was very satisfied with the performance and full redundancy with no critical points of failure for our business needs."
Four Dell servers, with automatic back up and load balancing between them, are housed in a dedicated, secure rack at DXI and these are supported by resilient network bandwidth supplied through an uncontended 100mb access port. This capacity is not capped however, and ePulse has the freedom to use bandwidth to the limit of the connection as circumstances dictate. The network, security and server devices, up to and including the operating system, are fully managed by DXI staff on a 24x7 basis.
Results
The service provided through DXI has given ePulse the "premier league" hosting infrastructure required in order to meet the very demanding requirements of some of the biggest financial institutions operating in financial centres around the world.
The OTCtrader application has been very stable since moving to DXI and the business is now set to reap the benefits. The ability to purchase Internet bandwidth and server capacity to match the demands of the business, together with having the flexibility to burst to the limit of the network connection at any time, have meant that unforeseen end user activity can be accommodated without any reduction in service speed or quality.
"We are geared up to take on new clients much faster now without having to worry about the service implications", said Patel. "DXI is a flexible, knowledgeable and helpful service provider with a powerful and highly resilient technical platform; exactly what ePulse requires for the future." he added.
ePulse contact details…
ePulse Limited
4 Crown Place
London
EC2A 4BT
United Kingdom
Tel: +44(0) 20 7422 6300
Fax: +44(0) 20 7422 6316
ePulse Website: www.epulse.ltd.uk